Publishers Weigh in on LRMI Experience

“The LRMI can really change how educators search and view content—and we want to be part of that.” This quote from Tim McHugh, vice president of Saddleback Educational Publishing, is typical of the feedback received from participants in the LRMI proof of concept metadata tagging project. In less than a year, more than 1,700 resources from 19 different publishers have been tagged.

As this phase of the tagging project draws to a close, we checked in with these early adopters to get their feedback on their experience with the LRMI. Most companies made positive comments, stating that getting started was “fairly easy” or “pretty simple.”

“The [AEP] folks made this easy for us by accepting our raw metadata ‘as is,’” said Doug Roberts, vice president of educational partnerships at Virtual Nerd. “That made it possible for us to participate despite being a lean startup organization.”

Virtual Nerd has tagged their entire library of interactive video tutorials in the hope that their content will be more readily available to any school system, regardless of their LMS or CMS.

McHugh noted that his company’s involvement with LRMI tagging dovetailed with work they were already doing. “We work with metadata quite a bit these days, so we have 90% of the data compiled—it’s just a question of cutting/splicing it to fit the framework,” said McHugh.

Another proof of concept participant, LearningStation, has tagged roughly 100 resources, with the ultimate goal of aligning formative assessments to content tagged to the LRMI. When asked about the steps they took for tagging to the LRMI, CEO Jim Kirchner said, “We simply associated a learning object to a handful of LRMI terms.”

Several publishers also touched on the benefits they hoped to gain from participating with the LRMI. “We want Virtual Nerd to be available to anybody using … platforms that are LRMI-aligned,” said Roberts.

Make sure you check back next week when we provide further publishing insights from Holly Cefrey, data resource manager at Rosen Publishing.

The LRMI gains power as increasing numbers of publishers and content curators participate. To learn how your company or organization can begin tagging materials to the LRMI specification, contact LRMI Project Manager Dave Gladney at dgladney@aepweb.org.